What should you follow, career or passion?

Meetali Asiwal

Thinker | Posted on 26-Jun-2018

Career pays your bills, but passion is what makes your life worth living. Passion in that key term that demarcate living from existing. Career is important because it's the main ingredient one needs to survive in this post capitalistic world. Passion however, defines you for yourself. Hence, both passion and career have their own importance and what needs to be done is not choosing one over the other but learning how two maintain a balance between the two in your life.

You are known in the capitalistic society by the kind of lifestyle you are leading. Since your lifestyle is directly related to your income, your income becomes your identity. And it is a well known and verified fact that passion does not always ensure you good income. But passion is that solace in the mundane life of nine-to-five job which becomes the reason of your real, natural happiness.

You may not always write poetry for a world wide audience, sing songs for Bollywood movies or dance professionally. You may not get payed for your spectacular photography skills. But this should not be a reason of not pursuing your passion. There are many success stories which tell us that passion could be turned into career, and if you are not able to do so you must keep following it for yourself at least.

You may have heard a lot of sayings about career and passions like "follow your dreams", "if you are good at something don't do it for free", "would Sachin Tendulkar have been as successful a doctor as he is a cricketer", and so on and so forth. What you need to do is create your own philosophy. World is your oyster. If Sachin Tendulkar had been a Doctor, he might have been a bit less successful but he would not have left his passion because he can't make money out of it. That's what makes us great and happy. Don't let income become your identity. Remember every career leaves a Sunday for you, and it's upto you how sunny you can make it for yourself.

tanya narang

Student (B.A(h) Philosophy, Content writer(Fashion and beauty) | Posted on 23-Jun-2018

Everyone out there want to chase their dreams.

No doubt, Dreams do become true. It all depends how you work on them. You want follow your passion or a career. Although sometimes they go hand in hand. If considered in a better way you can follow both career and passion as your hobby.

If you’ve been interested in self-improvement for a while, you’ve probably come across phrases like “follow your passion” or “find your dream job”.

If you love watching TV, you might just score a job as a TV critic for a newspaper but that’s not going to work out too well if you hate writing.

Passion:

Hopefully, you’ve got some interests and strengths that are relatively easy to turn into a career. I’ve loved writing since childhood, and today, I write thousands of words every day and get paid to do so. I have friends who are photographers, designers, web developer and they all enjoy what they do.

When most people think about jobs, they’ve got in mind a Monday to Friday, 8 – 4 or 9 – 5 office position, or at least something with regular hours. You might have friends or neighbors (or even colleagues!) who clearly don’t like their jobs all that much, but who see a boring or stressful job as an inevitable part of life.

Many jobs are a bit boring. But for lots of people, that suits them fine. Perhaps you’re in that group too: you see your job as just one part of your life, a way to make a living while you enjoy your evenings and weekends. It could be that you’re working hard now in order to take early retirement, or so that you can have a sabbatical from work.

So it is super important to know yourself. What actually you need from life. If you want a steady paycheck, there’s nothing wrong in working at something while pursuing your main interests outside work. I did this for a couple of years when I started my working life: I had an office job in IT and I carried on with my writing in the evenings and at the weekends.

What’s important here is to know yourself. When you’re thinking about following your dreams, you’ll probably have to face questions like:

Would you rather have more freedom or more money?
How self-motivated are you?
Are you someone who works well under pressure?
Do you like to switch off from work at the weekends?

Follow your dreams and get successful is important in the end.